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Cultural Anthropology’s Most Popular Web Postings of 2013

by Darren Byler and Jonah S. Rubin

There were many changes and collaborations at Cultural Anthropology this year—from the announcement of the journal’s incoming team of editors and its plan to go open access in 2014 to the public anthropology of “Hot Spot” analyses and “Curated Collections,” which highlight selected articles from the archive, the Cultural Anthropology website continues to evolve as a publishing venue. It also received a flood of new and returning online readers. Many readers put this online content to use in the classroom: Danny Hoffman’s peer-reviewed visual essay is a prime example of how multi-modal scholarship inspires conversation.

Thank you to all of our readers, both of the journal and the online content, for your continued support and readership. We are looking forward to bringing you great things in 2014 as we make the move to open access publishing for the journal and continue bringing innovative and exciting content on this website. Leave us a comment to the right and let us know what you want to see from us in the new year.

Many people found Cultural Anthropology interns Richard McGrail and Rupa Pillai’s introductory essay, interviews, and curated collection of Cultural Anthropology articles on Subaltern Studies a useful resource in 2013. This collection features six articles as well as reflections on "30 Years of Subaltern Studies" from Gyanendra Pandey and Partha Chatterjee.

The sixteen short essays and commentaries in this Hot Spot series were designed to highlight some of the most thoughtful voices reflecting on the the events of late March 2012 and to inspire further engagement, discussion, and commentary about contemporary Mali.

This journal article co-authored by Alexei Yurchack and the incoming lead editor of Cultural Anthropology, Dominic Boyer, discusses the hypernormalization of ideology in the context of the contemporary United States. The page includes an in-depth interview with Boyer and Yurchak.

This collection of essays introduced and curated by Cultural Anthropology interns Adonia Lugo and Jessica Lockrem considers the emergence of infrastructure as an object of anthropological study. Along with the essays, the collection features commentary and interviews with AbdouMaliq Simone, Nikhil Anand, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar, Daniel Mains, and Filip De Boeck.

This curated collection by Cultural Anthropology interns Jesse Davie-Kessler, Bascom Guffin, and Richard McGrail considers the relationship between affect and the body. The collection includes essays and interviews which center on research methods as well as the limits and applications of affect as an object of study.

On March 11, 2013, Society for Cultural Anthropology president Brad Weiss announced “a groundbreaking publishing initiative”: in 2014 Cultural Anthropology will become available open access—“freely available to everyone in the world.” Our first open access issue is coming in February, but in the meantime have a fond look back at the announcement.

This Hot Spot addresses the anti-government protests that first sprang up in Gezi Park, Taksim, in Istanbul in the summer of 2013 and later spread to much of Turkey. The nineteen brief essays each approach this uprising from a different angle, trying to decipher the new social forms Gezi Park generated.

Following the March 2013 announcement of the journal’s open access initiative, editors and interns at Cultural Anthropology developed a ShareCA list of articles which are already freely available through the support of Cultural Anthropology authors. This page also describes the process through which the journal's new publishing model will be implemented.

This collection of articles from the journal are organized around anthropological discussions of ritual. As part of the project, Cultural Anthropology intern Kevin Carrico and the featured authors discussed the relevance and usefulness of ritual in contemporary anthropology.

Danny Hoffman’s photo essay on diamond miners, aesthetics, and the body in the borderlands of Sierra Leon and Liberia inspired much discussion in 2013. Along with two review essays by Zeynep Devrim Gürsel and Alan Klim, Hoffman’s images and texts were a topic and object of study in anthropology classrooms; online forums took his essay as a point of departure for scholarly conversation. "Corpus: Mining the Border" was Cultural Anthropology’s most visited page in 2013!